Lynn Hamilton, the theater-trained actress who portrayed the girlfriend of Redd Foxx’s character on Sanford and Son and the neighborly Miss Verdie on The Waltons, has died. She was 95.
Hamilton died Thursday of natural causes at her home in Chicago, her former manager and publicist, Rev. Calvin Carson, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Hamilton also starred as the matriarch Vivian Potter on the 1989-91 NBC daytime drama Generations — which had the unfortunate task of running up against CBS ratings juggernaut The Young and the Restless — and as Cissie Johnson, one of the ex-cons featured on the 1991-92 syndicated nighttime soap Dangerous Women.
She also played Cousin Georgia Anderson on the 1979 miniseries Roots: The Next Generations and had recurring roles as the snippy Emma Johnson on NBC’s 227 and as a judge on ABC’s The Practice.
The Chicago-raised actress made her big-screen debut in John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) and went on to appear in such other films as Brother John (1971), Buck and the Preacher (1972) — both starring Sidney Poitier — Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Leadbelly (1976) and Legal Eagles (1986).
Hamilton first appeared on NBC’s Sanford and Son on its seventh episode in February 1972, playing a landlady who gives Demond Wilson’s Lamont Sanford a hard time after he gets his own bachelor pad following an argument with his dad, Fred (Foxx).
The producers were “so impressed with that one scene that a month or two later they decided to give Fred Sanford a girlfriend,” Hamilton said in a 2009 interview. Hired to play registered nurse Donna Harris, she was told by the bawdy Foxx that his show “needed somebody dignified opposite him; he was aware of his earthliness, shall we say.”
She worked on the sitcom through 1977, and while Donna and Fred got engaged, they never tied the knot. That was just fine with Lamont, who derisively called her “The Barracuda.”
While she was recurring on Sanford and Son, Hamilton made her Waltons debut in February 1973 on the 21st episode of the CBS drama when John-Boy (Richard Thomas) gives Verdie reading and writing lessons with her daughter about to graduate from college. (The episode, “The Scholar,” won a screenwriting Emmy for John McGreevey.)
She appeared on 16 other installments of the series through 1981 — Verdie winds up marrying Harley Foster, played by Hal Williams, also from Sanford and Son and 227 — and on Waltons holiday telefilms in 1993 and ’97.
Alzenia Lynn Hamilton was born on April 25, 1930, in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Her parents, Nancy and Louis, moved the family to Chicago when she was 4, and she attended Bloom High School in Chicago Heights.
Hamilton did some modeling and graduated from the Goodman School of Drama Theater, but she “was the only Black [actor] in my class, and so there weren’t any roles for me,” she said.
However, she gained acting experience with a South Side theater company, and after moving to New York in 1956, she appeared in Shadows and on Broadway in four short-lived plays: 1959’s Only in America, 1960’s The Cool World and Face of a Hero and 1963’s Tambourines to Glory.
Hamilton did Shakespeare for producer Joseph Papp and toured around the world in The Miracle Worker and The Skin of Our Teeth as a member of President Kennedy’s cultural exchange program, then joined the Seattle Repertory Theatre in 1966.
She auditioned for a part in Funny Girl (1968) and didn’t get it but decided to remain in Los Angeles, and she would land gigs on TV shows including Room 222, Mannix, Gunsmoke, The Rockford Files, Quincy M.E., The Golden Girls, NYPD Blue, Judging Amy and Cold Case.
Hamilton was married to poet and playwright Frank Jenkins (Driving While Black in Beverly Hills) from 1964 until his death in 2014 at age 89, and they collaborated on several theater productions.